Clinton Plan Would Target Poor Schools

While President Clinton's new proposal to help high-poverty schools
played only a minor part in his first town meeting on race last week,
it offered a revealing preview of his administration's 1998 agenda for
poor urban and rural districts.

The program is the first piece of a plan to help such districts
raise student achievement, administration officials said.

What else will fill out that package is still undecided, according
to Mr. Smith and Michael Cohen, the president's education adviser.

So far, administration officials have a sketchy outline for Mr.
Clinton's proposed "education opportunity zones"--the program he
announced at the town meeting in Akron, Ohio--and for plans to revive a
failed attempt to support school construction projects. But they don't
know how much money they will request for those or any other
initiatives in Mr. Clinton's fiscal 1999 budget.

Despite the lack of specifics, the focus on poor schools has
heartened urban school leaders. They say it represents the Democratic
administration's first attempt to make city schools a priority since
Mr. Clinton took office nearly five years ago.

"It looks like a great first step and a quite promising one," said
Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great
City Schools, a Washington group representing the nation's 50 largest
urban school districts. "I expect the whole issue of urban education
will be much higher on the national agenda next year."

Limited Details

At the Dec. 3 town hall meeting, one of a series planned as part of
Mr. Clinton's effort to heighten national discussion of racial issues,
the president briefly mentioned the educational-opportunity-zones plan.
It was the only addition to the racial-reconciliation agenda he
endorsed in the two-hour event at the University of Akron.

The "proposal [is] to create educational opportunity zones to reward
school districts in poor urban and rural areas who undertake the kind
of sweeping reform that Chicago has embraced in the last couple of
years," Mr. Clinton said.

To qualify for aid under the proposed program, school districts
would need to promise to offer students a choice of public schools to
attend, adopt challenging student-performance standards, tie grade
promotions to students' success in meeting them, and overhaul schools
where students consistently fail to meet the standards.

Whether local districts would have the authority to take all such
actions on their own is unclear, according to one expert on state
education laws. Only 30 of the states, for example, have laws allowing
public school choice, according to Chris Pipho, a spokesman for the
Education Commission of the States, a Denver-based coalition of state
officials.

While the program would reach rural schools as well, its premise is
built around reforms already under way in Chicago, San Francisco, New
York City, and other cities.

"School board members are on the same page, but are trying to find
out what works best," said Katrina A. Kelley, the director of the
Council of Urban Boards of Education, a division of the Alexandria,
Va.-based National School Boards Association.

Others question whether the scope of project, which Mr. Smith of the
Education Department said would not cost more than $1 billion a year,
would be great enough.

President Clinton is "essentially nibbling around the edges of what
are some major issues that need to be addressed," said Milton Bins, a
former deputy director of the city schools' group and the chairman of
the Council of 100, a group of black Republicans. "It may be enough to
keep you happy through the Christmas holidays, but come January 1
you're back to square one."

Voucher Link

To be enacted, the new initiative and any others must clear
Congress, where Republicans have made school vouchers for impoverished
children the top priority in their education agenda.

"Republicans have made it clear that some shift [on vouchers] would
be the ticket for entry," said William A. Galston, a former
domestic-policy adviser to Mr. Clinton who is a professor at the
University of Maryland school of public affairs.

Mr. Galston, a centrist Democrat, is urging the administration to
support a small, structured private-school-choice program. If it were
carefully designed, research would demonstrate whether choice boosts
student achievement, he said. The results either would prove most
Democrats and public school officials right--or force them to change
their opposition, Mr. Galston believes.

But Mr. Galston's proposal would fall flat before the public school
lobby and, probably, the administration. Both worked to help defeat a
series of GOP private-school-choice proposals this fall. A bipartisan
majority in the House stopped an attempt to allow districts to issue
vouchers from their portions of a federal block grant. ("Voucher Bill Fails on Bipartisan Vote In
House," Nov. 12, 1997.)

In the Senate, Democratic filibusters killed a proposed voucher
program for the District of Columbia in a spending bill for the city
and tax incentives to benefit parents of private school parents. Mr.
Clinton and his team had threatened vetoes if either bill cleared
Congress.

Such victories make Mr. Casserly optimistic that a GOP attempt to
attach vouchers to any new school legislation would be defeated.

"You run the risk [of losing], but I hope it's an acceptable one,"
Mr. Casserly said.

While the opportunity-zones plan would serve impoverished rural
districts, as well as urban schools, it clearly is intended to spur
reform in inner cities.

As Mr. Clinton said, it is designed to help schools follow Chicago's
lead in dramatic reforms that include putting schools on probation,
requiring summer school on a massive scale, and firing employees in
schools where student performance is dismal.

In addition, it is rural states that lack the well-defined standards
that would be required to qualify for an opportunity-zone grant, Mr.
Pipho said. That could leave schools in Iowa and Wyoming without a
chance to compete for the money, he said.

Urban Victory

The opportunity zones, and any plans that follow, mark a victory for
the Council of the Great City Schools, which has had a rocky
relationship with Mr. Clinton's administration.

In the 1993 debate over the administration's Goals 2000 school
reform plan, for example, city schools complained because all of the
money would be funneled through state education departments.

"When so much emphasis is put on states, cities tend to do poorly,"
Mr. Casserly said. As a result, urban centers haven't received grants
from the program that are proportionate to their school enrollments,
"much less their need," he said.

City schools would have been winners under a new Department of
Education formula for distributing $8 billion in money for the Title I
program for disadvantaged students, Mr. Smith said. But the 1994 effort
failed when Congress decided to protect wealthier areas from cuts. In
recent years, Congress blocked the compromise formula from being
updated with the latest data.

Relations between urban advocates and administration officials
improved in 1996 when Mr. Clinton proposed the $5 billion school
construction initiative. They became strained again last spring when
the president abandoned the program during the balanced-budget
negotiations.

After 15 city school districts volunteered last summer to
participate in Mr. Clinton's proposed new national tests, the
administration started to consider an urban agenda, Mr. Casserly said.
The city schools needed to prove that they are willing to take the risk
of having poor test scores made public in order to win federal favors,
he said.

Mr. Casserly said his group and other urban advocates are "kicking
around" ideas to pitch to the administration.

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